It’s 4:21 a.m. at Telford prison in Texas as I write this and I count eight people (that I know of) in my dorm that have been up high on meth and have not slept in days. Drugs in prison — like LSD, meth and K-2 — produce hallucinations, all symptoms of a psychotic state, and I witness psychotic episodes almost regularly. Delirium, a temporary state of extreme mental excitement, marked by restlessness, confused speech and even frightening hallucinations, most always happens when one has been up for days on meth or high smoking K-2. Being without sleep for days characterizes one with extreme suspiciousness and anxiety, and I’ve come to learn that when someone is afflicted with paranoia not to make eye contact with them.
(Unrelated but interesting to note: I know solitary confinement inmates have a need for eye contact because I work the building. Having been living in the dorms now for the past three years — an overcrowded all-male housing enclosure without any privacy (versus living in a cell) — I’ve noticed that something very peculiar (and bothersome) takes place within one’s consciousness concerning the constant making of excessive eye contact.
Don’t Miss: A Former Addict on Eradicating Drugs in Prison
One of the more disturbing aspects of “The Game” is having to witness countless people fall victim to the corruptive influence of drug use. Mind-altering and mood-changing substances of all kinds and their indulgence is not only sociably acceptable for everyone and all races, but because of the lack of recreational activities due to short staffing and budget cuts (games, sports, hobbies and other forms of acceptable play offer inmates purpose, amusement and relaxation to refresh the mind and body), inmates become stir-crazy from long close confinement from staying on “lockdown.” (It has been shown in numerable studies that putting a sane person with the mentally insane can cause the former to become unsound.)
There’s no such thing as general population, G-4 and G-5 inmates anymore. Everyone is doing 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24-hour lockdowns due to the severely diminished integrity of this institution. This is no longer a penal institution. This is the deliberate indifference and intentional inattention of sufficient custodianship by the State of Texas that has led to a theatre of cruelty hidden from public view. Tiresome monotonous conditions and very minimal mental activity and stimulation results in a decline in mental health where most find themselves (at one point or another) in a place where life has become an intolerable situation, even impossible.
Suicide has routinely become an alternative to living in present conditions. So has the use of drugs in prison, and I have to watch good people (as not all prisoners are bad people), even friends and loved ones, viciously participate in self-destructive behavior to the point of being broken and mentally reduced to mere animal instincts and devoid of conscience.
Worst is to watch this marked transformation take place in people with a sincere desire to stop using and a willingness to learn a better way of life, with no appropriate solutions made available to them. Even if anything related to recourse from drug addiction were made available on “Hellford,” it would closely resemble a 12-step recovery program hosted by the former drug lord Pablo Escobar in which he would both shamelessly weigh bags of dope in your presence while telling you to pray for recovery.
I always wondered why in America’s “War On Drugs” they only seemed to police urban areas, and they even changed criminal sentencing laws as if America’s poor was the source of the nation’s drug problem. Poppy plants don’t grow in urban environments and its residents don’t own an airplane to traffic heroin and cocaine from its source.
It’s the same thing with the “War On Drugs In Prisons.” I’ve been awakened to a drug dog between my legs, innumerable drug searches, strip searches, drug tests, and shakedowns, etc. — all ineffective in diminishing the volume of contraband.
The “problem with contraband” will continue, not because they don’t put the drug dog at the front door where officers come in through. Not because the war isn’t focused elsewhere besides a prisoner population who has zero access to drugs. But because of “economic biology.” Simply put, as long as people demand drugs (and all short staffed prisons have the greatest demands), someone will come along and supply them, as economy is rooted in this principle, and there is an insatiable demand waiting to be fulfilled on Hellford.
The “War On Drugs” by the administration here consists of nothing more than finding someone in possession of two tops of K-2, sending them to the county, and giving them two more years stacked to their sentence — as if they didn’t share in the responsibility of your becoming an addict or being in possession of the contraband in the first place. Yet sincerely, and for many reasons, I do not totally blame the staff for the situation on Hellford.
There are so many dynamics and degrees to this game (and my incarceration) that I intentionally have not included, because some things are better left unsaid. And due to the poverty of the English language, I am unable to imaginatively describe in any detail the impressive insanity that I have been made to witness and endure. The “overview effect” is a felt shift in consciousness experienced by astronauts while viewing earth in its entirety during space flight.
The other day, a “new boot” officer asked me, “Is Telford really the worst unit in the State of Texas?”
I looked him solemnly in his eyes and said, “Welcome to Hellford.”
A look of inexpressible bewilderment came over his face, and I knew in that instance he no longer identified as a correctional officer but as the crew member of a spaceship viewing the entirety of the world from a dark and distant place that both inmates and officers call Hellford.
Arnold Barnes III #01633044
Telford Unit
P.O. Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
